[sangnoir]

Consumers are not responsible for macro-economic changes that make a subset of businesses unviable. I was likening Shale Oil companies that could only be profitable at >$95 a barrel to companies that were only viable when capital was cheap - both groups should have known and planned for the respective numbers changing.

[lazide]

Again, what does that have to do with the original statement?

[sangnoir]

This entire thread is interrogating whether consumer behavior (excessive consumption ) is to blame for business failures as suggested, but never explained by the original statement.

[lazide]

It’s trying to describe excessive consumption, which is always going to be subjective - except perhaps if we use the description ‘drives up prices beyond historic norms’. Which is why they put it in quotes.

And excessive production is also always going to be subjective - except perhaps if we use the description ‘causes a glut of product which drives the price of a product below the reasonable/historic cost to produce that product’.

So excessive production is that which bankrupts producers. And excessive consumption is that which drives up prices unsustainably. Yeah?

[sangnoir]

> ... except perhaps if we use the description ‘drives up prices beyond historic norms’. Which is why they put it in quotes.

This makes little sense for oil - there are no "historic norms" for the price of oil; just a very wide band of prices. The OPEC cartel was formed was to coordinate production to tame price swings and increase profitability.

> So excessive production is that which bankrupts producers. And excessive consumption is that which drives up prices unsustainably. Yeah?

These cycles are normal, and self-correcting, lagging positive-/negative-feedback cycles are a recurring theme in many disparate fields. Governments, businesses and consumers may not like the implied instability, but picking a single point on the sinusoidal plot and declaring that "this is the optimal amount of consumption/production/profits"[1] seems misguided to me, simply on the basis that its inherently unstable.

1. Or declaring an optimal number of predators and prey if it's a prey-predator cycle.

[lazide]

So we agree that the original comment was no less ambiguous or confusing than after this analysis?

[sangnoir]

No, we are don't agree. I challenge the existence of a "correct" level of consumptions, and how it's derived is still ambiguous - all I have gathered so far is that it's below whatever it was when the shale oil companies went out of business. I can think of a couple of confounding factors, so I'm confused why consumer behavior should be assumed to be the primary driver here.